The networking of electronic devices has enabled great advances in technology. For example, local area networks enable employees of an organization to communicate more conveniently with each other using e-mail and other software applications. The Internet and associated applications like the World Wide Web enable similar communication across the world, and also enable the delivery of rich services to various users, such as web pages, hosted applications, and numerous other implementations.
Many speak of obtaining such services from the “cloud.” Such activity generally involves providing computing services from server systems and accessing those server systems from a large number of client devices, such as laptop computers or smartphones. As the “Internet of Things” becomes more predominant, the number of end node client devices will grow greatly. But the cloud approach may become too inefficient or inflexible (or both), as communications must travel too far to get to the relatively low number of servers that provide the services, or as the servers are called on to respond to an extremely large number of requests. Furthermore, decisions made in end-points based on local information can render communication with the cloud unnecessary, except for information about results that are of non-local interest.